Fact Check Me: Rich People Problems
Normally, I can’t stand stories about the problems of the rich.
Movies and TV shows built entirely around giving us mere mortals a peek behind the curtain— into mansions we’ll never live in, vacations we’ll never take, and lifestyles so detached from reality they may as well be fantasy.
We’re supposed to care deeply about the rich handsome playboy struggling to find love, or the socialite balancing three affairs while planning a gala, all portrayed by actors who are themselves rich enough that they probably have assistants to remember their kids’ birthdays.
And for those of us whose majority of problems could be solved by a modest lottery win, it’s hard to care.
Really? Your biggest issue is whether your boyfriend truly understands you while you sip wine on a balcony overlooking the Amalfi Coast?
Cry me a river.
And even when these stories try to sell us on romance, you know damn well six months after the wedding he’s cheating on her anyway. We see it in the tabloids every day.
But Your Friends and Neighbors is different.
Because underneath all the glamour, it’s not really glorifying wealth— it’s exposing it.
The show follows a successful investor, played by Jon Hamm, who loses everything: his career, his access, his place in the machine.
And in desperation to maintain appearances— to keep his ex-wife and kids in the house, the private schools, the country club memberships, the tennis lessons— he turns to crime.
Not violent crime. Not heists. Not grand larceny.
Petty theft.
He begins breaking into the homes of his wealthy friends and neighbors, not to clean them out, but simply to skim from the top.
A watch here. A bracelet there. A pen worth more than most people make in a year.
Not because they won’t miss them— but because they literally can’t.
That’s the point.
My favorite moment was seeing a luxury pen— worth an average working person’s annual salary— pulled from a drawer filled with identical pens, thrown together carelessly, used once to sign contracts worth more money than most of us will earn in a lifetime.
And the show lingers on these things.
It catalogs them. Shows them off. Names the brands. Lets the camera sit on them like a commercial.
Almost to the point where you wonder if the show is sponsored by the very luxury brands it’s critiquing.
But intentional or not, what it ends up doing is forcing the audience to stare directly at the grotesque excess of wealth.
Because while the story is fiction, the lifestyle isn’t.
People really do live like this.
There are people in this world with drawers full of watches worth more than neighborhoods. Wine collections worth mortgages. Closets bigger than apartments. Cars they forget they own.
And meanwhile, millions of people work forty, fifty, sixty hours a week just to survive.
So no— Coop isn’t Robin Hood.
He isn’t noble. He isn’t righteous. He’s selfish, broken, and desperate.
But he is something even more interesting:
He’s an antihero acting as a middle finger.
A man from inside that world ripping the curtain down and showing us what’s behind it.
And once you see it clearly, once you stop viewing that lifestyle as aspirational and start seeing it for what it is—
it stops looking glamorous.
It starts looking disgusting.